


and a knife to cut it with

by looselipssinksubs



Category: Lymond Chronicles - Dorothy Dunnett, Supernatural
Genre: Bunker Fic, Crossover, Gen, Pie, angels; unreliability and illiteracy of
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-09-11
Updated: 2013-09-11
Packaged: 2017-12-26 07:29:51
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,689
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/963241
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/looselipssinksubs/pseuds/looselipssinksubs
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>“Are you trying to tell me that a sixteenth-century psychic looked into the future and told Philippa to write you a message about pie?”</p>
            </blockquote>





	and a knife to cut it with

Sam glared at the hole in the wall on the far side of the firing range. Some of his shots had landed on the target (maybe not inside the outlines, but on the actual sheet of paper), but some hadn't. He didn't need Dean seeing that and giving him the sorrowful look that seemed to have become his default expression. He couldn't do much, these days, but at least he could fix the holes in the wall. He put his weapon away, turned the lights off, and went back upstairs.

Dean was leaning back in a library chair, with his feet up on the table, smiling at a yellowed piece of paper. Stacks of old manuscripts, his open laptop, a bundle of letters tied with a ribbon that had faded and frayed nearly to threads long before this bunker had ever been built, were all arranged on the table, pushed aside to clear a space for Dean’s dirty boots on the nice shiny clean antique table.

Sam frowned at the boots pointedly. Dean looked up from the sheet of paper he was reading (older than their grandfather, but much more recent than the manuscripts and letters, he thought automatically-- if they ever got out of this business, they could set up shop as antique dealers).

“What’s up? You want some chicken soup?”

Sam gave up on Dean’s disgusting manners for the moment. “Not now. Do we have any plaster of Paris?”

For some reason, this made Dean widen his eyes in incredulous delight. “Do we have _what_?”

“Plaster of Paris.”

Dean threw his head back and positively _cackled_.

“What?”

“Nothing, nothing.” He shook his head. “Oh, man,” he said and swung his feet down and got up to head for one of the supply closets, whose insides he’d rearranged in a system incomprehensible to Sam. “Come on, let’s go see if we can find you some plaster of Plaris.”

“ _Paris_ ,” said Sam, “not Polaris.”

“Yeah, that’s what I said. Plaris.” He pronounced the word gleefully.

Sam followed him, frowning a little. On the one hand, it was a good sign that Dean was making jokes, even obnoxious and nonsensical ones. On the other hand--

“Here you go, Slam. Plaster of Plaris.”

“What the fuck is wrong with you.”

Dean smiled sweetly at him. “I don’t know what the fluck you’re talking about.”

Sam looked meaningfully at the plaster in his hand, then at Dean, and raised his eyebrows.

“Don’t even fucking _think_ about it, Montresor,” Dean warned him, and went back to his research. Sam blinked. He’d meant to imply that he was going to hit Dean with it. Trust Dean to remember _that_ out of all the things he’d forgotten from English class.

To his humiliation, Sam discovered that he was too tired now to actually patch up the wall. He left the plaster of Paris on the floor under the bullet-holes and climbed wearily back up to the main room, where he gently sat down ( _not_ collapsed!) onto a couch across from Dean.

“What are you doing, anyway? I thought you were researching angels.”

Dean had come to the next sheet of the letter; he wasn't smiling anymore. He glanced up at Sam distractedly. “Yeah, this is related to that, at least partially. Remember I told you I was typing up Philippa's stuff so Charlie could run it through some kind of decryption thing? Turns out the Men of Letters already decrypted it, but they didn’t bother copying the whole thing, just what they thought might be useful. So I’m reading what they kept in English while Charlie’s program does its thing on the full text.” He waved at the laptop to illustrate.

“Okay,” said Sam. “What does Philippa say about angels? Who is Philippa, anyway?”

“Dude. _Philippa_. Philippa Crawford. In Edith’s room, remember? The portrait with all that crap behind it?” Dean leaned forward. “You okay, Sammy?”

“Yeah, I’m fine.” He did remember, now that Dean had reminded him. One of the bedrooms they’d found had clearly been a woman’s room, occupied when this bunker was last opened; her clothes were still in the closet and a sad, dusty tube of lipstick stood sentinel beside the bedside lamp. Her name had been Edith Roberts. Sam hadn't found any trace of her in his surreptitious Googling.

She’d been young enough to tack up pictures of Frank Sinatra with little hearts drawn in the corners. Above the bed, beside Sinatra, Sam recalled, had been the portrait of a woman in vaguely Elizabethan dress, which served more as a lid than a hiding place for a cache of papers and books shoved in haphazardly, along with a partial chess set.

“Right, yeah, Philippa,” he said. “So that’s, what, her diary?”

“A few volumes of it, yeah. And some of her letters. I took the least damaged stuff and left the rest for later.”

Philippa Crawford. Why did that sound familiar? “Wait a second,” said Sam. “Holy crap. Philippa _Somerville_ Crawford? Wife of Francis Crawford? Knew everybody in the French, English, and Scottish courts, including all the psychics and magicians in Europe, fake and real?”

“Yup, that’s her. She hung out with Nostradamus, that’s why I’m reading this. Wait, did you say she was friends with _psychics_?”

“I don’t know if she was friends with them, per se--” That was deliberate, to make Dean huff and roll his eyes-- “but yeah, she knew everybody who was anybody. John Dee mentions her by name in some of his letters.”

“Okay,” said Dean, “okay, that explains the pie, then.” He sounded very relieved.

Sam sighed. “Why does it always come back to pie, with you?”

“Hey! It’s not always pie.”

“Yeah, sometimes it’s porn.”

“Yeah, okay, but she brought up the pie first, not me.”

Sam considered this phrasing. “Dean?”

“Yeah?”

“Are you trying to tell me that a sixteenth-century psychic looked into the future and told her to write you a message about pie?”

Dean lifted his chin and met Sam’s gaze defiantly, daring him to laugh.

“What the _fuck_.”

“It’s a recipe, not a message,” he defended himself. “Look, just take a nap or something, I’ll tell you when I get to the end of this decoded section.” (And that had to be revenge for “per se,” because Dean had said “decrypted” before, and Sam _knew_ he knew the difference.)

“Shut up, Martha Stewart, I’m not taking a nap.”

“You’ll take a nap if you want any of this pie.”

“There isn't any pie.”

“There will be if you take a nap.”

“Sixteenth-century pie?”

“Sixteenth-century _blackberry_ pie. Now go the fuck to sleep.”

Sam lay back on the couch and went the fuck to sleep, fighting it all the way.

*

 

After he awoke and stumbled to the bathroom to splash cold water on his face, he went to the kitchen in search of pie. Dean was wearing the ancient lab coat he insisted on using as an apron, despite the splatter of demon blood across the front. (He probably _liked_ the splatter of demon blood.) A large beige disk lay on a baking sheet.

“That’s… not a pie,” Sam concluded.

“Yeah, no, Philippa says wait ‘til Saturday. So I made you a giant cookie instead.”

“Philippa says to wait ‘til Saturday to make a pie,” Sam repeated incredulously.

“She says, _go not to Walmart, but wait ye until Saturday market-day and buy fresh sweet blackberries from John Peters the farmer_.”

“That’s. Um.”

“Creepy and disturbing, but in a nice way?” Dean supplied.

“And this pie recipe is meant specifically for you?”

“Gotta be. It’s followed by instructions to check Baby’s high-beams and a seriously disgusting drink that’s supposed to make you stop coughing.”

That made Sam cough, of course, as though his cough was now psychologically contagious the way yawning was. “How could she possibly know what high-beams are?” he asked, when he finished. He looked at his palm; no blood this time, at least.

“I figure that’s what _the night-lanterns on your carriage_ meant. The left one’s broken, anyway.”

Sam picked off a piece from the edge of the giant cookie. It was pretty good.

“Are you planning to tell me what that plaster of Plaris bullshit was about?”

Dean leaned back against the counter. “I've been going through the angel section of the card catalog, and today I got to the entry _angels, unreliability and illiteracy of_.”

“Illiteracy?”

“More like an inability to spell. Philippa went to Nostradamus for help finding something, so he got out a fancy version of an ouija board and they did a spell to call up the angel Anael--”

“Anna? Our Anna?”

“Anna wasn't the type to pull this shit. No, Anael told them to look in Paris, spelled P-L-A-R-I-S. They thought it was making a mistake, so they asked twice. Same thing. When they asked it to be a little more specific, it told them CLERASI.” Dean grinned and waited for Sam to work it out.

“Okay, you got me,” Sam said finally. “What's a clerasus?”

“Nothing. But ‘cerasi’ are cherries. There’s a Cherry Tree Street in Paris.”

“So… why the extra L?”

“I guess I’m not the first human to corrupt an angel. Phil--”

“Dean, you didn't corr--”

“Philippa says,” Dean continued, emphatically, “that Anael must have picked up the habit from William Baldwyn.”

“And William Baldwyn is…?”

Dean shrugged. “Some asshole who couldn't spell.”

They munched pieces of the giant cookie silently. “I guess since they all fell, we can’t ask Anael to find Clastiel,” said Sam at last.

“No… But at least we’ll know Anael if we ever run into him.”

“Or her.”

“Yeah. Or her. Just our luck-- a lovely lady lacking logic and literacy.”

“Dean--”

“Lemme guess, I have to let up on the Ls or lose my life?”

Dean leaped out of the way as Sam lunged for him, but he was saved by the faint sound of the laptop going _ding_ in the other room.

“Less lazy lounging, little sibling. Let’s look at those lost volumes,” said Dean, and fled.

Sam crunched his cookie and pondered the practicality of paralyzing him in plaster of Plaris.

**Author's Note:**

> I made up Edith Roberts. The creators of Night Vale made up John Peters (you know, the farmer). Dorothy Dunnett made up [Anael](http://books.google.com/books?id=I6RMY2zVLEQC&pg=PT420&dq=the+silence+tightened+checkmate+dunnett&hl=en&sa=X&ei=BI4wUsX-C4zc8wSFyoDIBg&ved=0CC8Q6AEwAA#v=onepage&q&f=false) and [William Baldwyn](http://books.google.com/books?id=XYf8RueSPe0C&lpg=PT661&ots=K9H1sl4kuK&dq=william%20baldwyn%20ludo&pg=PT661#v=onepage&q&f=false) (long may he languish locked in L).


End file.
